You are obviously not a fan of PS238.
Created by Aaron Williams, who is also known as the maker of Nodwick and Full Frontal Nerdity — it has been described as “Take the kids from Springfield Elementary, give them X-Men powers, and send 'em to Hogwarts.”
FISS is your basic package of Flight, Invulnerability, Speed and Strength. Quite a few metas have that package - so much so that when Julie went to select her code name, she picked “84.”
Invulnerability, and the ability to turn white hot. The hot thing is so I can melt through any restraints or burn any people trying to hold me.
That should do it. I won’t be particularly heroic but I couldn’t really be stopped.
Someone would be out to capture and study you. If not my own government, somebody else’s. If not that, some corporation. It only takes one, so I’d need superpowers to ensure that couldn’t happen
Ah, forget being a super hero. I just want to give Wolverine’s healing ability to Johnny Knoxville. Sit back and watch what he does.
I don’t understand how you could be an effective crime-fighter without precognition. The reason crimes can and do occur with police forces that get funded with thousands and millions of dollars every year, is because no matter how great and well trained they are, or how great the technology is, you can’t predict when crimes are going to occur to stop them.
The only thing I can think of in order to prevent crime is being able to clone myself infinitely, and station myself everywhere around the city I’ve been asked to protect. Every shop, every street corner, everywhere, will be a clone of me. If one of my clones sees a crime in progress, they will clone themselves like 50 times and just use sheer manpower to close in on the baddies. Keep throwing body after body at them until they run out of bullets if necessary.
So, infinite cloning. No other super powers necessary. Each clone is a perfect copy of myself, and each clone can re-clone as often as necessary, and so forth.
Easy. Spidey-sense writ large. The crime starts, the alarm goes off in your head, you just have to get there very quickly. It’s not precog because you didn’t know it was going to happen. It’s an essential element for a superhero and superhero stories, because a rescue from a future event has no drama to it. Stopping 9/11 in the airports is not nearly as overtly superheroic as flying up and harmlessly plucking each jet out of the sky moments before impact.
This is what I came in to say.
In the real world, the crime rate would have to be astronomical for you to ‘stumble’ across more than one crime every once in a blue moon, no matter how much ‘patrolling’ you did.
Being on a Grand Jury made me realize how sporadic, random and hard to catch real world crime is. If the intent is for the superhero to stop the crime in the act in the real world they would almost certainly have to be a precog, otherwise they would spend 99.99 percent of their time sitting around, surfing the net, getting fat and masturbating. Catching crime “in the act” is virtually impossible to do with regularity in the real world. Being instantly “aware” of a crime happening is more or less akin to pure magic and is just like a precog with a slight time handicap. The concept gets too precious.
The conceit of trying to have an effective superhero fight crime in the “real world” is completely insane. Real world crime fighting is extraordinarily complex. Trying to integrate that dynamic with a comic book action hero fails on ever conceivable level.
Eh, it’s a hypothetical that’s fun for me because it is a little ludicrous.
I wish the mods would allow me to post the entire first issue of Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. It’s a first person narrative from a Superman archetype called Samaritan. He recalls all the disasters and crimes he stops at the last possible second all over the world via his godlike superpowers and what amounts to an alien-super-science disaster scanner. He tells us that he dreams of flying, and flying is when he is happiest, but he must always rush to next disaster or to rush to his newsroom to keep up his secret identity. At the end of the issue, it’s revealed that he keeps of running clock of all the seconds he gets to spend in flight each day. Because he’s so fast, and despite circling the globe, it’s nothing - just a handful of minutes. It’s a nice poignant moment of reflection from a superman who can only intervene, not predict. Oh, and he dreams of flying.
Yeah but, Astro City has the same necessary comic book trope/assumption as all the other super hero stories which is that there are “super problems” a super hero can effectively do something to solve. In the real world wrong doing is almost always very granular and not susceptible to super hero action solutions.
If I had real super powers the best thing I could possibly do is put on entertainment shows to make money and start a foundation like Bill Gates did.
The ability to open an unlimited amount of einstein-rosen bridges. By creating small bridges all over the city an elctronic system could be used to detect any disturbances and which bridge they are coming on. This would be a very complex system, so it would be stored in a house or something, however it could then feed information to a portable hand-held device. The bridges can be used for quick travel, and by creating a thin layer of bridges in front of you that lead to space or something you would also become bullet proof. You could transport large amounts of hostages or civilians quickly and efficiently, and stop large objects from falling. The bridge could be used to transport criminals to prison, but can also be used to maim a person (you let the arm pass through then close the bridge - you cut off the arm.) You could also use it to generate money to support your super-hero lifestyle, and there are endless ways to do this.
This is not however my favourite super power, but I think if you were to only pick one that was very efficient, that would be it.
FISS with a side of shapechanging (limited to humanoid formsj), then join the police force under an alias.
Honest, honey. I’m a crime fighter!
That’s an interesting combination. The first attack method that comes to mind is a gas that knocks you out. After you’re unconscious you go into a swimming pool with tungsten chains on you ankles. Of course if you’re vulnerable to gas, that means you need to breath, so a trapdoor into a pit of low density liquid might drown you. A wide range of measures and counter-measures suggest themselves – a mark of a good superpower.
You couldn’t locate crime though.
The ability to grow (and de-grow) finger nails super fast?
Seriously, you could break some one’s skin with those things.
Which part of “invulnerable” is unclear to you? 
Crime will find me. Villains always (foolishly) try to kill off superheroes, so I should keep busy enough just taking care of the folks who try to kill me.
I’m a lazy and not particularly well motivated superhero. So sue me. 
The part that protects against death. There’s no universally agreed on definition, but my own feelings are that being invulnerable means you can’t be wounded or damaged. It doesn’t necessary mean that you don’t require oxygen. But since you’ve implied that it means “can’t be killed” I’ll accept that in this case.
Is there a super power that allows one to fulfill the crime fighting function while staying home and playing Call of Duty? Because I’d take that one. Something that lets me make an autonomous FISS “drone.”
Combine the FISS power set with Jaime Maddrox’s power of duplication. Make dupes to go out and fight crime while you stay home and play Call of Duty.
I’ll just take my favorite superpower- time control. I see a crime, I pause time, I do my thing, and unpause. Repeat as necessary. If I need to actually learn of all the crimes, then give me super senses, too.